Diane Keaton was born Diane Hall on 5 January 1946 in Los Angeles, the eldest of four children of a civil engineer father and a mother who won a local homemaker competition and photographed obsessively, a habit her daughter inherited. She took her mother’s maiden name professionally because another Diane Hall was already registered with Actors’ Equity. She studied drama briefly at college before dropping out to move to New York and train at the Neighborhood Playhouse, according to Wikipedia.

Keaton’s first significant work was on Broadway, understudying and then starring in Hair, and appearing opposite Woody Allen in Play It Again, Sam in 1969, which earned her a Tony nomination and began a working partnership that shaped both careers. Her film breakthrough came in 1972 as Kay Adams in The Godfather, the outsider through whose eyes the audience watches the Corleone family close in on itself, a role she reprised across the trilogy.

Annie Hall, released in 1977, made her one of the defining screen presences of the decade. The performance won the Academy Award for Best Actress, and the character’s waistcoats, ties and men’s hats, drawn largely from Keaton’s own wardrobe, became one of the most copied looks in cinema history. It also established the register she would return to for fifty years: nervous, funny, articulate and entirely unlike the leading women Hollywood had been producing.

Beyond the Oscar, Keaton received Academy Award nominations for Reds, Marvin’s Room and Something’s Gotta Give, and worked with Warren Beatty, Francis Ford Coppola, Nancy Meyers and Allen across a career spanning six decades. She also directed documentary and feature work, published several books on photography, architecture and her own life, and became a serious voice in Californian architectural preservation.

Keaton received the American Film Institute’s Life Achievement Award in 2017 and a Golden Globe for lifetime achievement, and remained a fixture of popular culture long after the Annie Hall years, largely through the later romantic comedies that introduced her to a new audience. Her death in October 2025 prompted an unusually broad outpouring of tributes, reflecting how many different generations had encountered her work.

Keaton was a long-standing face of L’Oreal, an association that ran for years and was unusual in featuring an actress well into her sixties and seventies at a time when the industry rarely did so. Her endorsement work was otherwise sparing and generally connected to design, publishing or eyewear, reflecting a public persona built on personal style rather than mass-market appeal.

Keaton’s most successful business was property. She bought, restored and sold a series of significant Californian houses over four decades, treating the work as design practice rather than speculation, and published books documenting the results. She also worked as a producer, backing projects including Elephant, which won the Palme d’Or, and lent her name to a small number of carefully chosen commercial ventures.

Property formed the bulk of her estate. She bought a Bel Air house in 2002 and sold it in 2005 for 16.5 million dollars, and acquired a Laguna Beach property in 2004 for 7.5 million which she sold two years later for 12.75 million after restoration. Her final home, in Sullivan Canyon on the Brentwood side of the Pacific Palisades border, was bought for 4.7 million dollars in 2011 and rebuilt around 75,000 Chicago bricks and industrial steel to her own specification, finished in 2015. She wrote a book about the process, The House that Pinterest Built. She listed it in March 2025 at 28.9 million dollars; her estate relisted it after her death at 27 million, according to Robb Report.